infoTECH Feature

October 04, 2011

Mellanox InfiniBand Selected by Microsoft

Microsoft (News - Alert) has selected Mellanox InfiniBand solutions as the networking I/O foundation for their SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) systems, Mellanox (News - Alert) has announced.

With the performance and efficiency of Mellanox InfiniBand, Microsoft's database and data warehouse customers' can get considerable runtime improvement in their workloads, such as loading, querying and exporting data. Targeted for data warehouse workloads that can reach from 10s to 100s of terabytes of data, Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) is a scale-out, massively parallel processing (MPP) relational database appliance.

Microsoft PDW provides worldwide customers with performance advantages for a wide variety of usage scenarios, with the help of Mellanox InfiniBand, the company stated in a press release.

“Mellanox and Microsoft are pleased to work together to add significant value and return-on-investment to their SQL Server customers' day-to-day database activities,” said David Barzilai, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies in a company press release. “Mellanox InfiniBand I/O networking products provide Microsoft's worldwide data warehouse customers with faster results for their critical business applications and workloads.”

The ability to efficiently move large amounts of data among nodes in the cluster is the major bottleneck that limits performance in an MPP system. Microsoft PDW can now provide benefits such as long-term storage in multi-tier data warehouses; offloading applications from enterprise data warehouses to generate high-speed aggregation and queries; economical, high-performance enterprise data warehouse or data mart; scaling data warehouses from 10s to 100s of terabytes; and stand-alone MPP data warehouse or distributed enterprise data warehouse.

In November 2010, the company claimed that, according to the recently released 36th edition of the TOP500 list report, its InfiniBand-connected systems grew 18 percent year-over-year, representing more than 43 percent of the TOP500, or 215 systems.

The company stated that InfiniBand-connected CPUs increase by 65 percent in TOP500 supercomputers, with more than 98 percent of all InfiniBand clusters leveraging Mellanox InfiniBand solutions.




Raju Shanbhag is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Raju’s articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Jennifer Russell
FOLLOW US

Subscribe to InfoTECH Spotlight eNews

InfoTECH Spotlight eNews delivers the latest news impacting technology in the IT industry each week. Sign up to receive FREE breaking news today!
FREE eNewsletter

infoTECH Whitepapers